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What is JAVA?

Hello dear readers of our blog. In today's article, we will introduce you to a very well known and widely spoken language in the development world. This is object-oriented programming language - JAVA.

We will start from history of the language. In the beginning of its development it was primarily used in programming of appliances. Development of JAVA language was officially completed in May of 1995. Applications written on it, can be compiled into byte code and at the same time can easily work in a virtual machine - JVM, which processes it and sends the instructions in special form to the interpreter. Initially language was called Oak. Over time, it was renamed into JAVA and was used for writing applications and server software. It is accepted that the final language got its name due to the island of Java, where the coffee was grown with the same name.

Let's look at the main benefits of this language.

Thus, applications written in JAVA, can run on any device where virtual machine exists, regardless of the operating system and hardware. Also, this language has very good security system. Recently, the language was so much improved, making it possible to accelerate the performance of applications written on it. It became possible to use native-code in the standard libraries. Also, hardware can be used to accelerate the processing of byte code.

JAVA includes such family of technologies:

- Java EE - Java Enterprise Edition - a set of specifications for the software enterprise.

We now want to provide detailed description of all versions of the JAVA language.

The first was a version of JAVA 1.0 development, which began in 1990 and was finally released only after 6 years.

Next version is 1.2, which included a keyword «strictfp» in 1998. Other included additions are:

- support for files and digital certificates;

- Java 2D;

- supports Corba, Drag-and-Drop, Unicode, and playing audio files of known formats;

- Swing was introduced for the GUI library.

JAVA version 2 - some sources call it as JDK 1.2.

After that, the next fifth version was released In 2004, it was decided to rename the version to the Java 5.0 instead of Java 1.5. The main additions are:

- annotation - the ability to add metadata that do not affect the execution of the code. Developers began to use tools for annotated code;

- the methods with indefinite number of parameters;

- import of static fields and methods;

- enumerated types - a full class for Java, can implement the interface. For them, there are built-in methods that provide the ability to obtain the values of the type by name corresponding to the name, character, values, type checking whether it is enumerable;

- the mean of generic programming - allows you to create classes and methods from the fields and parameters of any object type;

JAVA version 6, release of which was introduced in 2006, included changes such as the addition of the Japanese Imperial calendar, collections (interfaces for queuing, which works on both sides of the collection). There are also became available classes-streams that allows you to read and send compressed data over the network. There was system to control cache, ability to create a full multi-HTTP server using Java HTTP Server. From the point of view of work acceleration, the computing speed was increased by 70%. Many bug fixes were added in this release.

Java Standard Edition 7 includes bug fixes and OpenJDK was used as a development source, which is available under an open license GPLv2. There was also added support for programming languages with dynamic typing (Ruby, JavaScript, Python), and the updated XML-stack support for loading classes by url.

The eighth version included such innovations as additional functions to bypass collections, support for lambda expressions, dynamic loading of methods and more.

9 version uses support of closures, tight integration with JavaFX, annotation types, and so on.

It is necessary to understand what are the platforms that use the language more often then others. To date, the first place of course is the Android platform. The language on this platform is used for writing mobile applications, and the programs are compiled into a custom byte code for use in a virtual machine. Development of these applications can be performed by using the Eclipse and the "Android Development Tools" plug-in. Also, this language is widely used in the Linux platform. JAVA is the basis for all types of network applications, games, enterprise software and web content.

So, in this article we have introduced to you the history of the JAVA language, it's key features and benefits. In addition, we reviewed all aspects of the specified language and the changes which were introduced in each version.